Symmachus was a brilliant orator, writer, and statesman, often flatly labeled as one of the last pagan senators. Cristiana Sogno offers a reconstruction of the political career of Symmachus through close analysis of his extensive writings, while also proposing a critical reevaluation of his historical importance. In contrast to traditional interpretation, Sogno's study demonstrates that Symmachus was primarily an influential politician, rather than a mere pagan zealot.
By portraying the individual experience of Symmachus, the book sets forth a new approach for interpreting the political aspirations, mentality, and attitudes of Roman senators. The much-studied question of the Christianization of the Western aristocracy has created the illusion of a Christian and a pagan aristocracy rigidly separated from each other. Through her study of Symmachus, Sogno demonstrates the primary importance of politics over religion in the public activity of the late Roman aristocracy. Although the book is specifically addressed to scholars and students of Late Antiquity, it will also be of interest to classicists, ancient historians, and non-specialists who wish to know more about this pivotal period in Roman history.
Cristiana Sogno received her Ph.D. in Classics and History from Yale University. Currently she is Townsend Assistant Professor of Classics at Cornell University. Visit Professor Sogno's website at: http://www.fordham.edu.
As 21st-century citizens of developed countries, we are constantly bombarded by numbers in every aspect of our lives. Almost automatically, we learn to interpret how numbers are used in our language, what magnitude of numbers we expect to hear in particular contexts, how people in our community express degrees of confidence in the reliability of any particular number, etc. Context of this kind is lacking when we read a historical narrative composed in an ancient language, from a world vastly different from ours. In Quantifying Mentalities, Catherine Rubincam helps overcome this barrier to our accurate understanding of the numbers in the works of five major ancient Greek historians by providing a standard against which their credibility can be more accurately judged.
This systematic, quantified study is based on the compilation of statistics concerning a standard constellation of aspects of all the numbers in the historical works of the five earliest wholly or at least substantially surviving ancient Greek historians: Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon (Anabasis and Hellenica), Polybius, and Diodorus Siculus. Such a comprehensive study has not been attempted before. For scholars reading and writing about the history of ancient Greece the volume offers a tool for interpreting the numbers in these ancient texts with more sensitivity to the world in which they were written. Standard aspects of number use captured by the coding system are: the different types of number (cardinals, ordinals, compounds, and non-explicit but definite numbers); the subject category to which each number belongs (Time, Distance-Size, Military, Population, Money, and Miscellaneous); and the types of any qualifications attached to it (Approximating, Comparative, Alternative, and Emphatic). The statistics also facilitate comparisons of every aspect of number use between authors and texts, enabling the delineation of a numeric profile for each one. This allows us to read these texts with a greater sensitivity to how they might have sounded to the author and his original readers, thus providing a firmer foundation for reconstructing or interpreting ancient Greek history.
The mass shooting at a queer Latin Night in Orlando in July 2016 sparked a public conversation about access to pleasure and selfhood within conditions of colonization, violence, and negation. Queer Nightlife joins this conversation by centering queer and trans people of color who apprehend the risky medium of the night to explore, know, and stage their bodies, genders, and sexualities in the face of systemic and social negation. The book focuses on house parties, nightclubs, and bars that offer improvisatory conditions and possibilities for “stranger intimacies,” and that privilege music, dance, and sexual/gender expressions. Queer Nightlife extends the breadth of research on “everynight life” through twenty-five essays and interviews by leading scholars and artists. The book’s four sections move temporally from preparing for the night (how do DJs source their sounds, what does it take to travel there, who promotes nightlife, what do people wear?); to the socialities of nightclubs (how are social dance practices introduced and taught, how is the price for sex negotiated, what styles do people adopt to feel and present as desirable?); to the staging and spectacle of the night (how do drag artists confound and celebrate gender, how are spaces designed to create the sensation of spectacularity, whose bodies become a spectacle already?); and finally, how the night continues beyond the club and after sunrise (what kinds of intimacies and gestures remain, how do we go back to the club after Orlando?).
Queering Mestizaje employs theories of postcolonial cultural studies (including performance studies, queer and feminist theory) to examine the notion of mestizaje---the mixing of races, and specifically indigenous peoples, with European colonizers---and how this phenomenon manifests itself in three geographically diverse spaces: the United States, Latin America, and the Philippines. Alicia Arrizón argues that, as an imaginary site for racialized, gendered, and sexualized identities, mestizaje raises questions about historical transformation and cultural memory across Spanish postcolonial sites.
Arrizón offers new, queer readings of the hybrid, the intercultural body, and the hyphenated self, building on the work of Gloria Anzaldúa, Antonio Benitez-Rojo, Walter Mignolo, and Vera Kutzinski, while challenging accepted discourses about the relationship between colonizer and colonized. Queering Mestizaje is unique in the connections it makes between the Spanish colonial legacy in the Philippines and in the Americas. An engagingly eclectic array of cultural materials---including examples from performance art, colonial literature, visual art, fashion, and consumer products---are discussed, and included in the book's twenty-nine illustrations.
"Arrizón takes as her point of departure the connections and distinctions between the four keywords in the title (each with a long, specific, and convoluted history in its own right) while bringing together the Philippines, the Hispanophone Caribbean, and the United States to configure a map carved by the same blade of colonialism and imperialism. In its conjoining of queer, mestizaje, transculturation and performance, the pleasurable and enlightening variety of its textual examples, and its commitment to theorize desire from the space of queer mestizaje, her book makes a unique and accomplished contribution."
---Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, Stanford University
Alicia Arrizón is Professor of Women's Studies at the University of California, Riverside. She is author of Latina Performance: Traversing the Stage and co-editor of Latinas on Stage: Practice and Theory.
Illustration: Judith F. Baca, La Mestizaje (1991), pastel on paper. © SPARC.
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